


Pearlstuff

by Mici (noharlembeat)



Category: Darkangel Trilogy - Meredith Ann Pierce
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-29
Updated: 2013-06-29
Packaged: 2017-12-16 14:16:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/862950
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noharlembeat/pseuds/Mici
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Aeriel thinks back, to what the world has gained, to what she has lost.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pearlstuff

She wakes, slowly.

The pearlstuff does not speak to her much anymore, but it reminds her, from time to time, as she rises, that she does not need sleep. That she is wasting time. That time cannot be wasted. The pearlstuff does not understand, the Aeriel thinks, it does not understand that not everything is so urgent anymore. That things have been set aright, that the world has gained back so much that it has lost.

The Aeriel does not need sleep, but she is so tired.

She sleeps, not to take away that sense of duty, nor the sense of magic. She sees magic everywhere, but she’s seen it for so long she no longer remembers the world without it. She sees Oriencor’s palace (tomb, perhaps) fall, and she remembers the magic, not the sheets of winterrock collapsing into a great, still lake. Sleep is no escape from vision.

She sleeps to dream.

And she dreams.

She dreams of Bomba, her nurse (not hers, no, never hers, nothing is _ever_ hers), large and round and ample, who died for lack of water and the cruelty of the witch. She dreams of warm arms and laughing and long nights filled with spinning and stories. She dreams of stories, dragons and beasts slain by fair princes.

She dreams of house she grew up in. Her dreams there are wild and winding, a girl running through a house, following another girl, her cowardly shadow. She dreams of Eoduin, who she saved the world for, in the end. The stories do not always mention it. She does not meet many pilgrims – there are not many that come, a scant hundred a year, and more now than before, but that is the way of it – but some tell her story as it is told, and she thinks no, that is wrong. So she dreams the story as it was, of a scared slavegirl who climbed a mountain to kill a vampyre who she saved, too.

But it was for Eoduin, she thinks, at first.

She dreams of the other eleven, who she loved for Eoduin’s sake. She dreams of the Lons who see her still but treat her now as a Lady and not as the child she was when they met her.

She dreams of Erin.

Erin, who followed her, who stayed with her. Erin who grew old, because Aeriel was not like the Lady Ravenna. The more that Aeriel thinks of Ravenna, the angrier she gets. Ravenna, whose selfishness was the root of all this, Ravenna, who could not let go, Ravenna, who gave her an impossible choice with an impossible task. In the beginning, Aeriel was never angry with her. It was the way of the world. It was her burden. And Erin was there.

Erin did not stray, never. Crystalglass is beautiful, but as cold, in ways, as winterrock. Amusements were small. Aeriel learned her magic and plied her craft and Erin stayed and smiled and laughed. Erin loved her well. Erin was her friend and her sister and her shadow.

Her death was not a bad one. She was old, and she said, clearly, that she did not regret coming along. That she loved Aeriel dearly. Aeriel took her soul, so precious, so rare, and placed it in the missing point of her crown. Twelve and one maidens dance in the heaven, and sometimes Aeriel looks up and smiles at them, wishing them joy. Sometimes she looks up at them and her heart aches. Her heart. Her own heart.

It was many years after Erin had died before Aeriel felt the resentment set it. Resentment was a hard thread to spin, heavy but brittle, breaking and requiring her to start over. She would set it aside, and think of other things. It is why she dreams.

She dreams of Irrylath.

Her own husband, her own time squandered. She dreams of his beauty, because there was never a man as beautiful as he. She dreams of his solid seriousness, of his laugh – both in madness, and in love, that one time, so rare, cherished, precious. She dreams of it and holds it close, the dreams of that night, the dreams of them walking side by side.

She dreams of him and she wakes, tears on her face. The pearlstuff flares - _duty_ \- and she pushes it away. She is allowed her dreams. It is all she has.

She wraps herself in her wedding sari, because love is eternal. He died many years ago, her husband. She felt it, the day it happened, the sliver of pain in her heart. She knew. He never took another wife, he was faithful to her all his days. He never came to see her, but he could not. He feared, she knew, that he would not be the same man. That by the time that he had the moment of peace to travel to find her, he was old, and she was young still, forever young.

She would not have seen him, anyway. She was bound in duty.

But she dreamt of him, saw him grow old, and she would have not turned him away even as a doddering old man (although he never was). She loved him so, she loved him with a burning she did not understand. His heart had been cradled within her and hers in his, and there was more in that then the mere act of love.

She misses him.

She misses them all.

The world tipped. She fixed it. Rain fell again, in balance. The great rivers under the ground flowed, thick and rich and bubbling with life. The forests came back. There was no sign of a war anymore. Everything was set to right.

It has been so long. Irrylath’s heirs, Roshka’s sons, because they looked like her, he said, married to Hayden’s daughters, had grown old and died. Their children, and theirs, and theirs, and theirs, over and over, down the line for many, many years. Ten generations, and then five more, and then another five. Too many years.

Aeriel looks up with her great green eyes to the dancing maidens and her heart aches. Pearlstuff flares. She ignores it.


End file.
